In 2021, Douyin generated 800 billion CNY (~$112 billion) of GMV. Over the years, international luxury houses like Louis Vuitton, GUCCI, Dior, Chanel, Cartier, etc, have established their official presence on this No.1 short video platform. How to balance the entertaining vibe of the platform while maintaining an adequate positioning of your brand?

In today’s article, we will look at:

• Douyin eCommerce size
• Douyin TOP 500 best-seller analysis
• Distribution of products sold on Douyin by price range
• Best-selling product category by price range
• Summary

Note: All data comes from Newrank’s Xindou platform.

Douyin eCommerce Size

Douyin eCommerce has been growing at 430% per year and is projected to reach 1.2 trillion CNY in 2022. For comparison, Alibaba (Tmall and Taobao) GMV is 8.3 trillion CNY, and Pinduoduo is 2.4 trillion CNY. Douyin eCommerce will reach half the size of Pinduoduo with only 4 years of development. Considering the massive active users and eCommerce growth rate, Douyin is already a juggernaut in the Chinese eCommerce space.

Need help with your Douyin Strategy? Tell us your story, and we are ready to help.

Best-seller Analysis

During August, the top 500 best-selling products generated a combined Gross Merchandizing Value (GMV) of 4,372 million RMB (~614 million USD). All these sales are generated directly on the Douyin platform, through Douyin Store.

F&B and beauty are the top-selling categories

Food & beverages and Beauty & skincare are still the TOP 2 best-selling categories on Douyin, contributing 48% of the total GMV combined.

There’s considerable growth in the Fashion category: 8% of the GMV comes from general fashion, shoes, and hats, making it the No.4 best-performing category. Two years ago, clothing comprised only 0.4% of the total GMV.

More diverse product categories

According to a similar analysis we did 2 years ago about the TOP 100 best-selling Douyin campaign, back then, almost 70% of the TOP 100 GMV came from the TOP 2 categories combined (Food & beverages and Beauty & skincare).

Over the years, Douyin has become a more “democratic” platform where you can find all kinds of products, not just F&B and beauty.

Average selling price per category

The average price in Beauty & Skincare is 168 CNY (~23.6 USD). Fashion and Bags are a bit higher, around 200 CNY (~28 USD). People still buy more affordable items on Douyin.

The average price in the sportswear & outdoors category is 265 CNY (~37 USD), higher than bags and leather goods (196 CNY, ~27 USD). Chinese consumers are increasingly willing to spend on sportswear in pursuit of a healthier lifestyle and work-life balance.

Douyin is not only for cheap products

We studied the GMV from TOP 500 Douyin best sellers. In August 2022, 64% of the products sold cost more than 100 CNY (~14 USD), a significant increase from 19% in 2020.

27% of GMV of best-selling products come from products of above 1,000 CNY (~140 USD). Two years ago, this number was only 1%. Considering that young people who spend more than 1,000 CNY online are considered New Middle Class, that is a signficant amount to spend on one single social platform.

To give a comparison, Red users spend an average of 4,100 CNY per month. Although they don’t necessarily purchase on Red, they will more likely research on Red and purchase on Tmall or Taobao. Compared to Douyin, which has a rather even gender distribution, Red attracts more female users (70% active users) living in the higher tier (tier-1 and tier-2) cities with higher purchasing power.

As Douyin continues to attract bigger brands to sell directly In-App, Douyin eCommerce is getting more diversified, where you can buy either cheap or expensive products.

What kind of “expensive” products are people buying on Douyin?

We analyzed the TOP 500 best-selling products by category and price range, and came to the following conclusions:

Beauty & Skincare

For products ranging from 500 to 2000 CNY (~70 – 280 USD), the beauty & skincare industry contributed the highest percentage of GMV, contributing 27% of the total GMV of this price range.

Douyin has been a strong platform for cheap cosmetics brands. However, beauty products with higher price ranges are also picking up. Among these higher price ranges, you will find many international names such as La Mer, Estée Lauder, SK-II, etc. Regarding premium beauty, Chinese customers will still likely go for big international brands, trusting their R&D and functionality. So premium beauty brands don’t need to exclude Douyin from your China eCommerce options.

Food & beverages

Food & beverages, as a rigid demand, appear to be selling in all price ranges.

It’s common to buy cheap snacks, instant food, milk, bread, etc on Douyin. Surprisingly, among high price products of 2000 to 5000 CNY (~280 – 702 USD), 19% of the GMV comes from food & beverages. This is because premium Chinese liquors like Maotai (~3,000 CNY each bottle) are also counted in this category, contributing to the most revenue here.

Regarding prices above 5000 CNY (~702 USD), almost half of the sales come from watches and jewelry.

Fashion apparel & shoes

The general fashion category contributes 17% of the GMV among products ranging from 500 to 1,000 CNY (around 70 – 140 USD), ranking as the No.2 top category. Although most of the sales come from Chinese fashion brands. “Guochao” (国潮, proudly made in China) has become a trend on social media, and Chinese brands can produce more native content around it and thus easier to resonate with the customers.

However, Chinese consumers are less likely to buy more expensive apparel brands on Douyin: the fashion category only represents less than 5% of the GMV with a price range above 1,000 CNY (~140 USD). Most of the sales come from functional clothing such as down coats.

For fashion brands with premium positioning, it’s better to set up a Tmall Flagship Store than try to sell directly on Douyin eCommerce.

However, at a granular level, premium brands like COACH also sell well on Douyin.

Classical styles like COACH HADLEY sold 2000+ pieces on Douyin and accumulated 200+ real customer comments. On COACH’s Tmall Store, the same product has 1,000+ comments, five times more than Douyin Store. However, 200+ real comments can already give consumers enough information and confidence. It is striking that Douyin Store can already generate one-fifth of Tmall Store’s performance within only four years (Tmall launched in 2010, so 12 years till now).

Summary

Douyin is an interesting platform to look at, even for premium brands. Between Tmall and Douyin, Tmall can provide more established and experienced services, especially for the fashion or luxury category. If you already have a Tmall Store and are struggling to find new growth opportunities, it’s wise to consider Douyin because of the massive audience and rapid growth. It can be a perfect platform for exposure and sales if well-leveraged.

The post A Look Into 500 Top-Sellers on Douyin eCommerce appeared first on WalkTheChat.

In this article, we will look at:

• Overview of Livestream eCommerce in 2021
• Taobao Livestream overview, top performing categories, audience insights, etc
• Douyin Livestream overview, audience insight, and Douyin eCommerce

Overview of China Livestream eCommerce in 2021

• 930 million Chinese people watch short videos, expanding with an annual growth rate of 7.0%
• 840 million Chinese consumers purchase online, growing by 7.6% compared to last year
• 700 million Chinese users watch live streams (68.2% of total Chinese Netizens), with a 14.0% annual growth rate
• Among the 700 million live stream viewers, 460 million have purchased through live streams (44.9% of Chinese Netizens).
• Livestream eCommerce audiences have grown by 75.70 million, with a 19.5% growth compared to 2020 December.

Watching Livestreams has become a habit for many Chinese people: some follow fitness trainer’s livestreams to work out daily; some listen to live streams to release stress and aid sleep…

Live stream contents are not always about sales. Actually, non-sales-oriented sessions can also drive solid sales conversion, as long as the influencers have helped cater to their audience’s needs and problems or provided emotional value to their followers. After building trust and authentic relationships, sales will follow.

Insights about Taobao Livestream eCommerce

Taobao Livestream Overview

As the biggest eCommerce marketplace, Taobao and Tmall have existing advantages over their competitors.

Taobao Livestream has accumulated over 50 billion views, making it the TOP1 platform for live stream eCommerce aiming at sales conversions.

In 2021, the average viewing time of Taobao Livestream increased by 25.8%. Watching Livestream e-commerce is becoming a part of everyday life for Chinese consumers.

Taobao Livestream TOP10 Verticals in terms of Revenue

In terms of Livestream revenue, the TOP10 verticals have significant similarities with Taobao and Tmall’s existing strong verticals:

1. Women Fashion
2. Beauty
3. Jewelry
4. Consumer Electronics
5. Food
6. Mom & Kids
7. Household Appliances
8. Home Renovation & Decor
9. Bags & Accessories
10. Footwear

Taobao Livestream Audience Preferences

• Gender: females and males have clearly different preferences in the types of Livestreams they watch. Females enjoy watching live streams regarding fashion, bags and accessories, shoes, beauty, and life. Males are more fond of livestream about cars, home renovation, consumer electronics, outdoor sports, and education.
• Age: Gen-Z (people born in the decades of the 1990s and 2000s) love watching Livestreams of beauty and fashion products. Chinese young people pursue individuality, so trendy items in fashion&beauty capture their attention. People born in the 1980s are more practical: live streams about education, mom&kids, cars, and lives look more interesting to them.

Insights about Douyin Livestream eCommerce

Douyin Livestream Overview

As the creator of the global short video trend, Douyin is naturally strong in video content and KOLs.

Douyin Livestream seems to have more diverse categories than Taobao Livestream, ranging from food, traveling, and workouts to traditional culture, music festivals, online courses, fashion shows, etc.

Douyin Livestream Audience Insights

People come to Douyin looking for entertainment. It’s also reflected in the popular Livestream categories. According to the 2021 Douyin Live Stream Ecological Report (CN), here are the most popular Livestream categories that people love to watch on Douyin:

• Gen-Z and Millenials love watching content about anime, gaming, reality shows, sports, dancing, travel, technology, etc.
• Elder generations have different types of interests and entertainment. Content about parenthood, education, politics, popular science, culture, etc captures their attention better.

Douyin eCommerce

Although Douyin content seems to have a stronger entertainment label, the platform has also shown a strong capacity to drive sales conversion. Thanks to Douyin Livestream and Douyin Store, the short video leader has created a closed loop for In-App conversion, from discovery, interest, to purchase.

According to the 2022 H1 Douyin eCommerce Industry Report (CN), Douyin eCommerce revenue has grown by 150% compared to last year. In addition, more than 300k brands have created Douyin Stores and are selling through Douyin eCommerce. Douyin eCommerce can be an efficient way to move sales, especially for cheaper products, typically less than 200 CNY (~30 USD).

Are you wondering how to leverage Chinese Livestream eCommerce and which platform to choose?

Just leave us a message below, and we will be in touch with you!

The post China Livestream eCommerce: Taobao and Douyin Insights appeared first on WalkTheChat.

The Super Brand Day event will last from the 14th to the 20th of April. The limited collection includes two products: a facial cream (319 RMB / 60g) and a serum (329 RMB / 30ml). (source: L’Oréal Weibo & Douyin account)

L’Oréal leverages internet slang to resonate with Chinese females on Douyin

In China, the word “Versailles” (in Chinese, “凡尔赛”) stands for not only the French Palace. It is one of the most trendy internet slang among young Netizens. It’s similar to “humblebrag” in English but with little negative meaning. 

Thanks to famous CCTV host Benny Sa (撒贝宁), the slang soon went viral on the Internet and in real-life communication. While Chinese people study day and night to enter the top universities and to work in megacities such as Beijing and Shanghai, Benny Sa is an “exception”. He stated on a talk show: “I didn’t choose to go to Beijing. I got recommended to Peking University without attending the Colleague Entry Examination. I hesitated because it’s too far from home, but Peking University is just alright.” (See video clip here)

Another typical Versailles sentence would be: “I own so many apartments that I don’t have enough money to renovate all of them. Such a struggle!”  

L’Oréal used this cultural context in its slogan “you deserve to be Versailles (humblebrag).” This shows support to Chinese young females’ desire to be independent, confident, and pretty.  

Considering how to promote your brand and products in China with a localized strategy? Simply fill out this 1-minute form and we will be in touch with you.

Douyin eCommerce Super Brand Day becomes a major shopping festival

Douyin has become an essential social eCommerce platform. Its Super Brand Day keeps attracting many domestic and international brands to participate. 
In 2020, the Chinese leading smartphone brand OPPO successfully held Super Brand Day on Douyin. By leveraging Douyin KOL and KOC seeding, users generated fun video content and created a buzz. OPPO did multiple live streamings collaborating with top-tier influencers like Luo Yonghao and Lamu Yangzi) and other offline pop-up activities. As a result, OPPO Douyin account attracted 510k new followers, 400 million total impressions on Douyin platform, and 21.74 million total views in live streamings. (Source: ChinaDaily)

In 2021, C-beauty leader Perfect Diary, smartphone giant Huawei, and F&B leader Wufangzhai took part in Douyin Super Brand Day. 

Besides, German kitchen utility brand Zwilling also joined Douyin Super Brand Day in collaboration with Chinese celebrity Xiao Zhan. The GMV reached 102 million CNY (~15.7 million USD) in 24 hours, overachieving the sales target by 204% (source: China Daily)

Douyin helped the 209-year-old brand reconnect with young audiences and attracted young followers through celebrity marketing and KOL collaboration.

Is Douyin becoming the next Tmall?

A few years ago, Tmall invented “Super Brand Day” as the ultimate event aiming to push signature collections and launch new products. It is often combined with celebrity collaboration or any other IP collaboration. 

Tmall Super Brand Day is still going, but Douyin picked up with the trend and started Douyin Super Brand Day. 

The shopping experience for Gen-Z customers is more interconnected with seeding and customized interests than ever. On Douyin, the system customizes the feed based on users’ interests, behavior, and other interactions shown on social media. So it’s a perfect channel to reach potential young customers interested in your brand.

Douyin has created a full-funnel ecosystem from seeding to conversion. It also has its own culture and vibe, thus needs tailored marketing strategies to succeed. With the joint force of celebrity and Douyin KOLs, eCommerce posts real challenges to traditional eCommerce platforms such as Tmall.

Looking for more information about Douyin, the Chinese Tiktok? Read on here:

• Douyin Marketing Guide: 7 examples of successful Douyin marketing campaigns
• Step-by step Douyin Advertising Guide
• What is Douyin Payment?
• How to create a Douyin Store?
• How to create a Douyin Verified Account?

The post L’Oréal x Palace of Versailles Limited Collection Launch on Douyin eCommerce appeared first on WalkTheChat.

In this article, we’ll dive into Douyin advertising formats and strategies that will help you make the most out of Douyin. We will cover:

• Why Douyin is a good option for advertising 
• Douyin’s official advertising formats 
• Douyin Advertising specs
• Douyin Advertising segmentation and capacity 
• How to run successful Douyin Advertising campaign
• Few steps and workflow to run Douyin Advertising campaign

Reasons to choose Douyin Advertising

Why is Douyin a good option for advertising? 

Nearly half of the Chinese population uses Douyin daily (600 DAU), and is one of the Chinese social platforms with the highest user engagement and stickiness. According to Kantar and 36Kr, a user spends 120 minutes per day on average on Douyin to actively consume content and entertainment. This usage time is twice that of other social counterparts, including WeChat (61 mins), Red (57 mins), and Weibo (47 mins).   

Douyin users also show the highest advertising receptivity among all leading social platforms. For example, 43% of users indicate that Douyin ads are easy to accept, sometimes even entertaining to watch. A higher receptivity also leads to a better feeling for the brand and makes conversion more likely to happen. 

Douyin’s 4 different advertising formats

Douyin has four different ads formats. Which ones should you use? Read on.

In-feed ads

In-feed ads are the most common form of Douyin advertising, appearing in the For You feed of users as they scroll through videos.

This ad format includes an action call to take users to a landing page. For example, the landing page can be a Douyin business account or redirect to a product or live-streaming (if the business account has a Douyin store) for eCommerce conversion. 

With a CPM ranging from 10 to 50 RMB ($1.7 to $7.8), in-feed ads are a cost-effective format if you are looking for lead generation, eCommerce conversion, drive traffic to live-stream, or other types of performance-oriented campaigns.

Native ads

Douyin Native ads (or Dou+ ads) amplify existing content on the Douyin App, similar to “Boosted posts” ads on Facebook.

Interestingly, Douyin Native ads don’t include any watermark suggesting that they benefited from the advertising budget. Instead, they look just like any other Douyin video promoted via the algorithm.

They can also include e-commerce links, often driving users to Taobao, Tmall, or Douyin stores.

Search ads

Douyin also provides search advertising for brands to capture potential clients. For example, brands can define specific keywords related to their brand name (e.g., Dior), business (e.g., niche handbag brands), or services, just like search ads on Red or Google. 

Unlike other ad formats in the “For You” section, search ads appear only when users search related keywords. As a result, it can capture more qualified traffic in the lower funnel and help effectively convert people who are already interested in certain brands, products, or services. Therefore, they are also a bit more expensive than In-Feed ads.

Many international brands, including Gucci, Sephora, and Farfetch, use search ads to drive traffic to the official website or download the official App. 

TopView / Brand Takeover

This advertising format consists of full-screen ads displayed as soon as users open the App.

The full-page advertising can lead to:

• Landing pages
• Live-streams

This advertising format is most appropriate for brands looking for a branding boost, but they are not geared toward conversions to e-commerce:

• The focus is usually on branding, not on specific products or prices
• Can’t redirect directly to a product
• CPM/CPC is generally higher than other types of programmatic ads, such as in-feed ads

Douyin Advertising Platforms

OceanEngine Platform

Like Facebook or WeChat, Douyin also provides various segmentation capacities for advertisers to impact their audience. In the case of Douyin, you will create and manage your advertising campaign through the OceanEngine platform.

OceanEngine is the official mobile marketing platform from ByteDance. OceanEngine helps brands advertise products and services on Bytedance’s ecosystem. It covers Apps including Douyin, Toutiao (one of China’s largest mobile news platforms), Xigua short video, Huoshan short video, FaceU (one of China’s most famous selfie camera and filter Apps), and more. You can understand OceanEngine as Facebook Ads Manager, which contains data from Facebook/Meta, Instagram, and other Facebook/Meta group Apps. 

ByteDance Big Data

Tencent Ads used to have two separate ad systems for the WeChat ecosystem (MP platform) and Tencent ecosystem (GDT platform), which used to be an issue blocking data sharing between two different platforms. In comparison, ByteDance has always relied on collecting users’ activities in all the apps belonging to the giant social empire mentioned above. As a result, it is easier for the system to overview users’ actions and preferences across the affiliated Apps, and deliver the ads more accurately, thanks to a broader range of information gathered. 

ByteDance is a global leader in recommendation algorithms. Before the creation of Douyin, Toutiao was the most successful product of ByteDance. Toutiao is a news app that customizes push notifications and news feeds depending on each user’s interest and behavior. The vital machine learning of Toutiao provided valuable experience for Douyin. As a result, Douyin’s For You page (which is also highly customized in real-time) has become critical in keeping users in the App. The well-functioning recommendation algorithm is also why many people find Douyin or Tiktok “addictive”. Therefore, this app is expert for pushing the perfect content and delivering proper advertising that a user may be looking for. 

Douyin Advertising Segmentation

Douyin provides many dimensions for advertisers to find their target audience accurately. The details are as below (updated 2022 Jan):

Basic Segmentation

You can choose demographic targetings such as location (by province/city/area/town), gender, and age range (18-23，24-30，31-40，41-49，50+). Douyin Ads also provide segmentation based on environment, such as types of network (4G, Wifi…), Operating system (iOS, Android), etc.

Interest and Behavior

Douyin provides 20 category tags and supports up to 350 keywords. Category tags are general interest and behavior. Interest refers to users’ possible hobbies shown by their consuming habits on social media or related eCommerce; behavior means users’ actions such as view, engage, search, purchase, and so on. You can also choose a specific time frame to make the activity more relevant, for example, in the recent 30 days).

Interest example: fashion apparel and accessories, travel, mom & kids, pets, news, electronic devices.  

Behavior example: gaming, dining, daily services, education, furniture, and home decor.

Each interest & behavior category contains several more specific interest & behavior keywords. Thus, advertisers can select relevant granular keywords to focus on accurate audiences. For example, you can choose specific keywords such as fast fashion, streetwear, K-fashion, vintage style, and others under the fashion apparel category.   

Douyin Ads also provides System Recommendation keywords to help you automatically target users that might be interested in your brand or services based on big data.

KOL Targeting

Like Weibo Ads, Douyin Ads also enable you to target KOL’s followers or users who engage with these KOLs. You have two options: 

1. Target at a broader level by types of KOL, for example, followers of fashion KOLs, lifestyle KOLs, ACGN (Anime, Comic, Game, Novel) KOLs, food KOLs;
2. Or target specific KOL’s followers. You can select up to 30 KOLs. 

Advanced Targeting with DMP – Data Management Platform

Douyin DMP provides a lot of labels or tags to create a highly customized target group.

DMP Advanced Labels

You can filter the users by consuming capacity forecast, content consumption preferences (for example, celebrity content, reality shows, short videos), and recommended labels by vertical (such as beauty & cosmetics, automobile).

Private audience 

Once you have done Douyin Ads, you will unblock this function. It includes your historical advertising audience, APP audience, and landing page audience. 

Special seasonal labels

DMP also provides seasonal labels based on particular activities, recent hot trends, or Chinese festivals. For example, National Holiday audience, Spring Festival audience, trendy movie and series audience, gaming audience.   

Customize your target audience

Given all the targeting capacity above, you can customize your target audience either by taking the intersection or the union. You will be able to see the estimated audience size on Douyin or other ByteDance APPs once you complete the selection. 

How to run sufccessful Douyin Advertising Campaign

Define your campaign objective

Depending on your campaign objective, you might want to use different placements (feed, search) and formats (In-Feed Ad with CTA, Native Ads…) that lead to various measurement models (CPM, CPC, CPA…). 

If you are looking for eCommerce conversion, Douyin In-Feed Ads, Native Ads, and Search Ads will be your best choice. You can also combine In-Feed Ads and Search Ads to cover the entire user journey. 

If your main objective is massive awareness, Douyin TopView and Brand Takeover will guarantee maximum exposure to impact your target audience. It’s a common practice for big brands to leverage branding ads for official launches, new collection releases, brand ambassador announcements, and others. 

If you are unsure where you should start for your brand, please refer to the below chart with different phases and find our recommendation.  

Define audience mapping and target strategy

You might already have an idea of your ideal customer that fits your brand image and positioning well. For a quick start, you can collect the interest & behavior & keywords that you are using probably for Facebook/Instagram Ads and find its equivalent in Douyin. You can also refer to all the segmentation capacities that we explained earlier. 

However, China is such a vast country with a massive audience size, so you might need some local experts to “translate” your target audience into China’s context. If you need any help defining your audience mapping and targeting strategy, don’t hesitate to reach us for a tailored solution.

Customize your creatives for Douyin

Make it short and eye-catching

Douyin users are impatient. Video Ads rhythm should be quick, short, and concise; otherwise, Douyin users will easily swipe up if the content does not catch their attention in the first two or three seconds. 

Below is an example of C-beauty brand Perfect Diary. It starts with a question: “still wondering how to do your makeup for Chinese New Year?” Then quickly show seven types of makeup with fast-paced electronic music. The whole video is only 5 seconds but strong enough to make a user click “like” and probably go to the business account to know more. 

Make it Chinese-user friendly

Localize your content for Chinese users. Adapt your creatives by adding a subtitle (if the audio is in English) or voiceover in Chinese, or create some video content optimized for Douyin. If the content contains a conversation or a plot, adding subtitles is common even if the conversation is in Chinese. 

Adapt to Douyin style

Just like traditional video creatives that work for Instagram Feed might not work well for Tiktok or Reels, the best practice is to spend some time on Douyin to get a sense of the platform “style” and know what users are expecting. 

We can help you adapt your assets or produce video ads that Douyin users expect. Please feel free to contact us for more information.

Key Success Factor of Douyin Advertising Strategy

Like all the programmatic ads, the critical success factor for Douyin Ads is data and accurate targeting. However, programmatic advertising in China has one significant difference from its western “equivalent”: Most Chinese consumers will not go to official websites for shopping; instead, they rely on marketplaces such as Taobao, Tmall, JD.com. 

As a result, individual brands do not have easy access to their audience behavior or performance, which can use for advertising. On Facebook, it’s pretty easy to target your valuable audiences, such as website visitors, add-to-cart users, or shoppers for different campaign objectives. In China, however, it’s simply not easy because most of the traffic will not go to your website. Therefore, you will probably need to rely on Tmall data for retargeting ads. 

Therefore, you can rely on Ads for pure awareness or branding purposes without any problem. But for conversion-oriented campaigns, we’d recommend it to brands and advertisers with more than 400k RMB monthly GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) or provide retargeting data for better performance results. 

Therefore, for brands in an early stage in China, we suggest you consider Douyin Ads after several months of organic operation and feel confident about the market. It’s better to start by testing your market fit with influencer seeding/gifting and then begin advertising on social media to scale your brand.

A few steps to launch Douyin Advertising Campaign

Check if Douyin Ads permit your industry for advertising

Before considering Douyin Ads, check if Douyin permits your industry/vertical for advertising. Douyin Ads welcome verticals such as fashion, luxury, beauty, jewelry, F&B, childcare, home appliances, consumer electronics, and daily usage products.   

Here are the verticals not permitted for Douyin Ads due to regulations and law: 

• Cigarettes, including electronic cigarettes 
• Medical instruments, medical organizations, or apps  
• Competitor products such as online community apps, online video apps, video editing tools, music apps, etc

*source: https://jzt.jd.com/school/course/detail?contentId=3113

Here is a list of restricted industries. Douyin needs to review case by case and might whitelist some top brands that meet the platform’s requirements.

• Wine and alcohol 
• Health care products
• Medicine 
• Gaming (depending on types of games)
• Fintech
• Crowdfunding 

*source: https://www.opp2.com/76958.html

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us, and we will help to review case by case. 

Timeline and workflow to launch Douyin Ad camapign

We estimate roughly three weeks of preparation before launching your first campaign on Douyin. It includes two weeks of advertising account creation and verification, three weeks to define campaign objectives and strategy, audience mapping and targeting, and creative design. At around week 4, we will launch the first test and leverage the actual results and learnings to improve future campaigns.

We summarize the whole process as below chart:

Different approaches to leverage Douyin Advertising

Splash and Sustain

Step by step

Almost the opposite of Splash and Sustain, brands can start with in-feed ads for pre-warm, initiate hashtag challenge collaborating with KOL to generate engagement and co-creation, then leverage Brand Takeover and TopView for the most potent exposure on the big day.

Measure and improve your Douyin Advertising performance

Brand Lift / Conversion Lift

Similar to Facebook Ads and many other western platforms, Douyin also enables brands to measure the effectiveness of the ads with a data-driven method. It works just like A/B testing: among your target audience, the system will divide your audience into two groups, one will get exposure to your ads, and the control group will not. However, both groups could still receive ads from your competitors. At the end of the campaign, Douyin will provide a detailed report of how this campaign has benefited your brand by comparing test and control group results regarding brand recall, favorability, and likelihood to purchase.

Limitations: 

1. Time: you will need to run the campaign for at least two weeks to have a tangible impact on your audience. 
2. Cost: by intentionally dividing your target audience into two groups, you will have a smaller target audience, resulting in a higher cost of CPM. 
3. Therefore, it will be suitable for brands with a solid presence in China. It’s a way to measure how much advertising contributes to the brand quantitatively. We won’t recommend it for brands in a very early stage entering the Chinese market.

Dynamic Product Ads

Like Facebook DPA (Dynamic Product Ads), Douyin also provides Dynamic Products Ads for effective sales-driven campaigns. The logic is to use structured product data (brand name, product category, pricing) and let the product find its potential customer. 

You will need to connect your product catalog to launch dynamic product ads.

Douyin Advertising Specs

Douyin In-Feed Ad Specs

For any ad placements that appear in the feed, the requirements are as below: 

In-feed Ad Video requirement

• The video must have background music.
• The black screen area of ​​the first video frame shall not exceed 60%.
• Douyin supports vertical video or horizontal video. If you use horizontal video for in-feed ads, note that it does not support full-screen playback with a 90-degree rotation. 
• Video dimension: 540*960 (vertical), or 960*540 (horizontal). To ensure the best video resolution, Douyin recommends using 1080p videos. 
• Video format: mp4, mpeg, 3gp, avi format.
• Duration: 5s – 60s.
• Video size: no more than 500M.

In-feed Copy requirement

• The post’s title supports up to 55 characters, including hashtag challenge title (if any). Any Chinese character, letter, punctuation mark, and space all count as one character.  
• The title of the landing page supports up to 9 characters. It only applies if you need to build a separate landing page, such as a lead generation form.

Apart from these requirements, also keep in mind to avoid the screen area that might “overlap” with your account name and copy: there is a fixed information display area in the Douyin video, which may obscure part of the material content. Please avoid this area for the core elements of the creative.

Since different mobile phones have different occlusion ranges, the creative material might be cut or not showing completely. Therefore, we recommend avoiding the area of key elements in the video. Here is the mock-up of safety space provided by Douyin: 

You can also check the original file for more detailed information. 

Douyin Branding Ad Specs

For branding-oriented ads formats like Top View / Brand Takeover, the specs are as below: 

Branding Ad video requirement

• Dimension: 640×1136 / 640×960 / 480×800 / 750×1624 / 720×1280 / 1080*1920 / 1080×2340. To ensure the best video resolution, Douyin recommends using 1080p videos.
• Format: mp4
• Duration: 5s
• Size: no more than 5M
• No background music

Branding Ad copy requirement

• Title: supports up to 9 Chinese characters; additional characters could be cut off. 
• Source: supports up to 20 characters; Less than 12 characters will be optimal. (one Chinese character count as two characters; alphabet, punctuation mark, or space count as one character. This field serves as the back-end identifier of the ad delivery system. It will not display in actual delivery.)

If you want to know more about Douyin, here are several articles that may look interesting to you:

• How to create a Douyin verified account?
• How to create a Douyin store?
• What is Douyin Payment? A Simple Guide
• 7 examples of successful Douyin Marketing Campaigns

Conclusion

In summary, Douyin Ads leverage massive data from ByteDance to help your brand reach your accurate target customers in China. Chinese users are in love with short videos, and as a result, we still foresee a stable growth of user size and engagement on Douyin. 

If you have more specific questions about Douyin or Douyin Advertising, please feel free to drop a message to us, and we will be ready to help you.

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